Blogging is a roller coaster ride, with almost a year under my belt I have sure had my fair share of ups and downs. Lately it seems as though I have been on the downside of that slope, and when I get in a rut (in anything in my life) I like to get organized. This post will help me to go back up the slope of that roller coaster, and I hope it helps you as well.
Yesterday Lifehacker featured an open-source time-lapse application, Gawker, as their download of the day. Being involved in video production I downloaded it and checked it out. I realized that this tool can be used to monitor the activities in and around your Mac, and today I am going to show you how.
No viruses, no spyware, malware, none of that. So how do you keep your Mac secure? I am talking about keeping your Mac secure from those who walk right up use your computer while you are MIA. Specifically for the college student who leaves their Mac on all day, I have a nice selection of tips to keep intruders out!
Before moving to college I have a long list of things that I need to accomplish, of course there are the very important things, like four hours of alcohol education, and the things that I have been trying to get done before I move. One of those things has been to combine my three iTunes libraries, sync my three iPods on one computer and optimize iTunes for my college experience.
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There are a lot of different people who read my website, and in adding e-mail subscriptions to zamwi, I have realized that there lots of people who subscribe through e-mail, probably because they do not know about RSS. So I have decided to go back to the basics and tell anyone how to use RSS.
Blogging isn’t simple, there are millions of blogs that are registered, and millions that no one reads besides the author. After blogging for a few months and having my ups and downs I want to share the experiences I have had to help you make your blogging more efficient.
I drive an old car, most people make fun of it, but I don’t care. I like it, and it gets me where I need to go.
Video on the web is a huge part of the internet experience of today. Being involved in video, I decided that I needed to stay with the times and post my video works online for the world to see. There are a number of struggles faced when publishing video including bandwidth, storage, time, clients, compression…I plan on sharing with you how I faced these struggles and host my weekly vidcast Video Class.
I’ve got two NES systems, one of which doesn’t work, and I’ve often wondered a cool easy way to use the other one. I stumbled upon a cool site the other day that has answered my question!
If you’re like me you like to upgrade, but sometimes, like in the hacking world, upgrading can be fatal. That statement was just proven wrong! Continue reading »
Hookin’ it up with WordPress
Getting away from Myspace was one of the best things I ever did online. I started one of those lame accounts just to keep in contact with people, but soon I learned this is what people considered to be the web. …let me explain…
I get tired of hearing people say, “Hey, you wanna see my website?” And then they give me the URL and its “myspace.com/someusername” That aggravated me, yet I was a part of it.
I’ve wanted to launch a site for a while, but I wanted to do it myself. Blogging seemed cool, but too myspace for me, so I stayed away from that idea, until I stumbled upon WordPress.
WordPress lets you make a blog your way, you create the MySQL database, you do the coding, you run the site! That is exactly what I wanted. Here is how you can do it too!
Hosting
For starters you have to get some space out there in the magical world wide web. I bought my domain and server space through godaddy.com. They offer great packages with sweet bandwidth and space. I pay $3.95 a month for their 250 GB of bandwidth and 5 GB of space. This is plenty for a blogger. Be sure that you buy a package with PHP, I made the mistake of using a windows server…don’t do that. Go Linux and enable PHP, its the same price on godaddy.
When you get the server you need to set up WordPress. To get the source Wordpress file click here. Wordpress gives a decent tutorial on how to configure their PHP files, but don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it!
Configuring WordPress’ PHP
WordPress’ famous 5 minute installation worked pretty good for me, but I’ll share with you how to do it in simplier steps.
First you need to set up a MySQL database, its pretty easy if you are using Godaddy. Open your control panel and click MySQL under databases. Setup a name and password for the database, and don’t forget it! Also be sure to jot down the hostname, because you’ll have to configure this later.
Now that the database is setup you’re ready to configure WordPress. Open the WordPress folder and click on the wp-config-sample.php file. Enter you data about your MySQL database. The DB_NAME is the name of the database, the DB_USERNAME is the username of the database. Also the DB_PASSWORD is your MySQL password and the DB_HOST, which says you probably won’t have to change, I did, it is the Host Name.
Save the file as wp-config.php and your ready to get your blog launched! How awesome.
FTP
From the Godaddy control panel click on the FTP client and add the wordpress folder to your server. It is as easy as that. You can rename your folder to anything you want, the URL will be yoururl.com/wordpress (or whatever you name it).
Once you’ve FTP’d the files go to the URL and WordPress will take you step by step through the process.
Themes
This is really the final step in the configuration process, because using WordPress from here is easy. Setting up a different theme is a breeze. I use the K2 beta two theme for my blog and configured the colors using the excellent tutorial by Paul Stamatiou found here. By clicking on the Presentation tab and the Themes sub-category WordPress gives in detail how to add new themes to your blog.
Conclusion
Blogging is an awesome tool if you do it yourself and WordPress is the perfect way to do it! Go dump your myspace and start today, its really easy and I’m here to help. If you need more information or help drop me a line at zach@zamwi.com
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